BREAKING -- N.Y. TIMES endorses HILLARY in tomorrow’s Sunday Review: “Democratic primary voters ... have the chance to nominate one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history. ... Mrs. Clinton has honed a steeliness that will serve her well in negotiating with a difficult Congress ... It will also help her weather what are certain to be more attacks from Republicans and, should she win the White House, the possibility of the same ideological opposition and personal animus that President Obama has endured.” http://nyti.ms/20dJjmg

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TIMES endorses KASICH -- “A Chance to Reset the Republican Race”: “Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, though a distinct underdog, is the only plausible choice for Republicans tired of the extremism and inexperience on display in this race. And Mr. Kasich is no moderate. ... Still, as a veteran of partisan fights and bipartisan deals during nearly two decades in the House, he has been capable of compromise and believes in the ability of government to improve lives.” http://nyti.ms/1PGUZ5V

TOP TWEETS: @GlennThrush: “There are so many f---ing reporters in Des Moines right now, it makes me want to be a bartender. They’re the only ones getting any actual news” ... @PeterHamby: “Hoping entrance/exit polls have better Qs about sources of political info for voters this cycle. TV ads/shows/social media cc @ZacMoffatt.”

ON MONDAY, we’ll find out two things, intimately related: Is Trump for real? And are pollsters screwed?

– “Pollsters sweat it out as Iowans prepare to vote: After a series of headline-making whiffs, did the pollsters get Trump right?” by Steven Shepard: Polling is “caught between its telephone past and probable internet future. But 2016 is here now – starting with the primaries, which many pollsters say are more volatile than general elections. ... [C]ampaign pollsters cautioned against reading too much into the relative accuracy of the horse-race polls in the early states. The number of candidates ... combined with the instability of a traditionally late-deciding electorate, make precisely predicting the results in Iowa and New Hampshire difficult. ...

“[O]n the Democratic side[,] ... nine polls [have been] conducted since mid-January, with Hillary Clinton ahead in five of them, and Bernie Sanders ahead in four. The results are more consistent on the Republican side, with Donald Trump leading in all but one of the nine surveys. Ted Cruz, the second-place candidate to Trump in those eight polls, leads the ninth. Marco Rubio in third place in eight of the nine polls, too. ...

“After the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary, the race shifts to the little-polled states of South Carolina and Nevada. From a polling perspective, the problem changes, shifting from volatility and a lack of reliability, to a lack of polling ... As of Friday afternoon, there have been 18 publicly released polls of Iowa Republicans and 16 polls of New Hampshire Republicans conducted since the start of the new year. In South Carolina and Nevada? Just three – all in South Carolina – with only one conducted by live telephone interviewers.” http://politi.co/1PLDRSH

AIR WAR – “Ahead of Iowa caucuses, Rubio to air 30-minute TV specials” – AP/Sioux City: “Rubio is airing 30-minute television programs in every Iowa television market this weekend. Rubio is flying from Dubuque to Sioux City and other cities on Saturday ... The TV programs will show excerpts of the town hall-style meetings Rubio has relied on in recent months ... Rubio’s team has focused more on Iowa in the past several weeks. His campaign sees an opening to rise into the top tier ... alongside ... Trump and ... Cruz. [Rubio] has held more public events in Iowa since Thanksgiving than any other Republican.” 1-min., 40-second preview, in which he talks about how Americans’ rights come from God, not government http://bit.ly/1PLupPp

--“Marco Rubio’s Iowa mojo: The Florida senator is all confidence and smiles as caucus day nears,”by Anna Palmer and Eli Stokols in Muscatine, Iowa: “With just 72 hours before the first votes are cast in the Iowa caucuses, the Florida Republican was exuding confidence on the campaign trail — cracking impromptu jokes, pointedly criticizing his main competitor Sen. Ted Cruz and spending more time taking questions from the press and donors.” http://politi.co/1Kh92D1

HEADLINE OF THE DAY, on LATimes.com: “Sanders tries to be the next Barack Obama in Iowa, not the next Howard Dean,” by Chris Megerian and Evan Halper http://lat.ms/1WTvYtS

UNDERSTANDING BERNIE -- JOE ROSPARS -- founder of Blue State Digital, and Obama’s principal digital strategist in 2008 and 2012 -- on cover of WashPost Outlook, “What Sanders can learn from Clinton (and vice versa): You can’t be just an insurgent or an insider ... You must be both”: “Both the Clinton and Sanders teams inherited an ingrained culture of constant testing and data-driven optimization that shapes every ad, every email, every call script for a volunteer and every list of voters they call. And both campaigns have built their organizing efforts on the foundation of tech and data infrastructure at the Democratic National Committee that first came together in the 2008 cycle. This modernization of movement-building also means that the potency of an insurgent-led campaign has grown — by a lot.

“In a previous era, a candidate like Sanders might have been deprived of the scarce talent or limited party infrastructure needed to mount an enterprise-level campaign. But Sanders has been able to make use of the wide talent pool and the specific tech cultivated by Obama, and he’s now surpassed the pace of grass-roots fundraising that the Obama campaign set in 2008 and 2012, with more than 2.5 million individual contributions before the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, by the end of 2011, had 2.2 million.) ...

“If Sanders wins, he’ll need to pay far more attention to traditional politics than he’s done so far, in order to leverage the institutional support that the Democratic Party apparatus can provide its nominee. The winner will be tempted to view victory as a validation of the insider-friendly or insurgent-led approach. But ... the opponent they’ve just defeated will, nevertheless, have accomplished something they didn’t.” http://wapo.st/1m4RnTr

** A message from Walmart: One of the Largest Single-Day Pay Increases Ever: As an industry leader for competitive pay and benefits, we’re committed to helping our associates grow. On February 20th, we’re raising wages for 1.2 million hourly associates, one of the largest single-day, private-sector pay increases ever. Learn more. http://bit.ly/1lCn2eR **

SPOTTED: former Speaker Boehner at the Hay Adams bar Off the Record last night ... Geoff Morrell with Tom Nides, Bill Plante, George Will, and James Rosen, at four separate tables yesterday morning at the Four Seasons hotel for breakfast ... Rob Saliterman, Scott Sendek, Sean Spicer, Paul Kane, Doug Heye, Kelley McCormick, Ali Weinberg and Josh Rogin at the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Verizon Center last night.

SPOTTED at West Palm Beach Airport, and turning lots of heads, boarding a jam-packed flight to DCA at 7 last night: Mitt Romney, looking slim and well rested, with wife Ann, lugging their own bags. They had been at running mate Paul Ryan’s Thursday political retreat. Another attendee, Lindsey Graham boarded next, headed past the Romneys to take a seat in coach. Graham warned the stranger next to him, “looks like you are the unluckiest guy on the plane.”

JOHN DICKERSON’s food diary -- “CBS News’ John Dickerson Knows Sundays Are Meant for Buffets,” by NY Mag Grub Street’s Sierra Tishgart: “I can smell dinner before I even walk in the front door. Anne’s making a roast chicken based on a recipe we got from Senator John McCain. I covered his 2000 presidential race, and he had some of the reporters over to his vacation home in Sedona, Arizona. He grills like mad when he entertains — on several grills all lined up. He puts the chicken on the grill covered in Hog’s Breath, a seasoning from a Key West bar. He then bastes the chicken with lemon constantly. It’s delicious. It also works perfectly with pork. It is perhaps my favorite meal that we cook at home.” http://grb.st/1PoA23W

TALES FROM THE TRAIL -- “Feel the churn: On the campaign trail with Ben and Jerry,” by Yahoo’s Hunter Walker in Des Moines: “On Wednesday, the morning after Yahoo spent the day with Ben and Jerry, we ran into [Trump campaign manager Corey] Lewandowski as he ate breakfast with other Trump staffers. He asked what we had been up to and when he heard about Ben and Jerry, Lewandowski joked that their Sanders flavor should simply be called ‘Nuts.’ Then Lewandowski had another great flavor idea for Ben and Jerry. ‘They should make one for Trump,’ he said. We asked what Lewandowski would call the Trump ice cream. He didn’t hesitate. ‘Big balls,’ Lewandowski said.” http://yhoo.it/1QNdWcc

FIRST PERSON -- MAGGIE HABERMAN on NYT A14, “Trump’s Sons Are Still Stumping for Dad, Far Off the Trail”: “The closest I’d ever come to hunting before was buying steaks from an organic farm in upstate New York. But on Friday, three days before the Iowa caucuses, I pulled on a bright orange vest and went pheasant hunting with Donald J. Trump’s sons [Donald Jr. and Eric].I’ve rarely felt more out of place.I grew up on the Upper West Side, went to Fieldston for high school and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. ... The sons’ role is, in part, to demonstrate that there is an authentic middle-American relatability beneath Mr. Trump’s plutocratic exterior: They hunt, too. So a handful of reporters were allowed to trail them as they shot pheasant at High Prairie Farms, a 1,300-acre bird habitat.” http://nyti.ms/1SqQema

STATE OF THE ART -- “Cruz’s TV ads judged most effective,” by Scott Bland: “According to Ace Metrix’s ratings, the normal rating in the political category was 452 ... Cruz’s ‘kill the terrorists’ ad scored a whopping 704. ... Republican viewers ... consistently found Cruz’s spots more watchable, persuasive, and attention-getting, and they typically made more viewers want to seek more information about Cruz after watching the spots. ... [P]articipants ... rated [the first Trump spot about banning Muslims from the U.S.] as the second-best ad.” http://politi.co/1WTtDPH

--“Air Head,” by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: “How aviation made the modern mind.” http://bit.ly/20d2yfJ

--“When America’s Titans of Industry and Innovation Went Road-Tripping Together,” by Shannon Wianecki in Smithsonian: “Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and their friends traveled the country in Model Ts, creating the Great American road trip in the process.” http://bit.ly/1PFSxMW

--“The Great Whiskey Heist,” by Reeves Wiedeman in March’s Men’s Journal: “How one distillery worker enlisted friends, family, and a few fellow steroid enthusiasts to liberate hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of premium bourbon, one barrel at a time.” http://mjm.ag/1JOqIpC (h/t Longform.org)

--“Ann Selzer Is The Best Pollster In Politics,” by Clare Malone in FiveThirtyEight: “How her old-school rigor makes her uncannily accurate.” http://53eig.ht/1WTeXA9

--“Who Owns the Sun?” by Noah Buhayar: “Warren Buffett controls Nevada’s legacy utility. Elon Musk is behind the solar company that’s upending the market. Let the fun begin.” http://bloom.bg/1PLx1g7See the cover, which shows a wrestling match between the billionaires with Buffett gripping Musk in a headlockhttp://bit.ly/1KMPmSm

--“Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button,” by Sarah Frier in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “A giant version of [the like button] adorns the entrance to the company’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook’s 1.6 billion users click on it more than 6 billion times a day—more frequently than people conduct searches on Google.” http://bloom.bg/1nECmth

--“The Wreck of Amtrak 188,” by Matthew Shaer in tomorrow’s N.Y. Times Magazine: “What caused the worst American rail disaster in decades?” http://nyti.ms/1ShEJix

--“The Dark Underside of the Show-Dog World,” by Mark Seal in Vanity Fair: “In the wake of the possible murder of a prized Irish setter, Mark Seal examines the impassioned personalities who devote their lives to dogs, and the tense rivalries that can become sinister.” http://bit.ly/1ZZMkRT

--“The Epic Fail of Hollywood’s Hottest Algorithm,” by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine: “When Ryan Kavanaugh wasn’t hanging out with Bradley Cooper, or leasing a horse for Kate Bosworth, or negotiating a Golden Globes shout-out from Christian Bale, or bringing a baby wolf to the office, he was talking up the sweetest game in Hollywood: the chance to invest in movies that seemed certain to succeed.” http://bit.ly/1nUUVte

--“Who Poisoned Flint, Michigan?” by Stephen Rodrick in Rolling Stone: “A writer returns home to find a toxic disaster, giant government failure and countless children exposed to lead.” http://rol.st/1Tt1P4M

--“The Real Legacy of Steve Jobs,” by Sue Halpern in the NY Review of Books: “Even as a multimillionaire, and then a billionaire ... Jobs sold himself as an outsider, a principled rebel who had taken a stand against the dominant (what he saw as mindless, crass, imperfect) culture. You could, too, he suggested, if you allied yourself with Apple.” http://bit.ly/1SqFnIQ

FUTURECAST – “Apple builds secret team to kick-start virtual reality effort,” by FT’s Tim Bradshaw: “Apple has assembled a large team of experts in virtual and augmented reality and built prototypes of headsets that could one day rival Facebook’s Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s Hololens, as it seeks new sources of growth beyond the iPhone.The secret research unit includes hundreds of staff from a series of carefully targeted acquisitions, as well as employees poached from companies that are working on next-generation headset technologies.” http://on.ft.com/1NH569n

MEDIAWATCH -- PETER BAKER named NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief -- Joe Kahn, Michael Slackman, and Jodi Rudoren email the staff: “Since he joined The Times in 2008, Peter’s authoritative, probing, nuanced coverage has defined President Obama and his administration for our readers. Unflappable and inexhaustible, Peter has chronicled the most momentous stories of the era ... Yet if he navigates Washington like few others, Peter has also proved himself a gifted foreign correspondent. He covered Russia, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the Washington Post. Now, Peter will take up an overseas assignment for us. Later this year, after a book leave, Peter will become our Jerusalem Bureau Chief, replacing Jodi Rudoren, who has started in her new role as a deputy on the international desk.”

-- Reuters has hired “Ronnie Greene as Washington Enterprise Editor, based in the D.C. bureau. ... Ronnie comes to Reuters from the AP, where he was a reporter on the national investigations team. Before that, he was an investigative reporter and editor at the Center for Public Integrity.”

--Will Dobson to NPR as new head of its international desk -- Edith Chapin, executive editor of NPR, emails the staff: “He served as a daily contributor to the Washington Post’s editorial page during the height of the Arab Spring, breaking news of the Egyptian military’s torture of female political activists. As Managing Editor of Foreign Policy from 2004 to 2008, he directed and managed the editorial planning of Foreign Policy’s award-winning magazine, website, and nine foreign editions.”

--NYT’s Robert Mackey to The Intercept: “Mackey is joining The Intercept to report on and analyze news events that center around human-rights abuses and democratic reform across the world. ... Mackey comes to us from The New York Times, where he pioneered online coverage of foreign news with his column ‘Open Source’ ... [and previously] was the editor and main writer of the Times’ news blog ‘The Lede,’ anchoring hundreds of live accounts of breaking events.” http://bit.ly/1Tt8xb8

--NYT Business Day front, “Drop Dead? Not the Newly Relevant [N.Y.] Daily News,” by Jonathan Mahler: “Just a few months ago, after an aborted sale and sweeping layoffs, The News seemed to have completed its devolution from the model of a big-city tabloid to a battered symbol of the diminished state of America’s newspapers. But the recent string of covers, which were all widely shared on social media, have sent a very different message — if not about the paper’s long-term financial prospects, then at least about its continuing cultural relevance.” http://nyti.ms/1m3Qdru

FIRST LOOK – Bridge Project memo from Eddie Vale, “Kochs Retreat For 2016 With Trump In The Spotlight & Their Dirty Laundry In The Press”: “The Summer of Trump became the Year of Trump, and we’re edging ever-closer to the Cycle of Trump. That presents a serious problem for the Koch network: Trump’s the single candidate the Kochs don’t control. During the Kochs’ last donor summit, Trump mocked the GOP candidates who attended as “puppets.” http://bit.ly/1PL9dsA

WEST WING DEPARTURE LOUNGE – KATIE BEIRNE FALLON to exit as head of legislative affairs – the President’s statement: “Republicans and Democrats in Congress have their differences - but when it comes to Katie, they’re united in their admiration and respect. ... [F]rom bipartisan budget agreements, to protecting a deal that will prevent a nuclear Iran, to ensuring the long-stalled Ex-Im and IMF reforms were enacted, we simply could not have made the progress we’ve made without her. It’s never easy to lose a close advisor, and it’s even harder when they’ve become a good friend. That said, there’s nobody better prepared to step into this role than Amy Rosenbaum, and I’m very pleased she’s agreed to serve as my next head of legislative affairs.” Politico story about Katie’s departurehttp://politi.co/1Tt8DPS

THE PRESIDENT’S WEEK AHEAD: “On Tuesday, the President will meet with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to discuss legislative priorities for the coming months. ... On Thursday, the President will deliver remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. In the afternoon, the President will welcome the 2015 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors to the White House to honor the team on winning their Championship title. ... Later in the afternoon, the President will welcome President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia to the White House for an official working visit.”

** A message from Walmart: One of the Largest Single-Day Pay Increases Ever: In addition to increasing our starting wages and giving all 1.2 million hourly associates a raise, we’re launching new short-term disability and simplified paid time off programs. Every year, we promote 160,000 associates to jobs with higher pay and more responsibility. When our associates succeed, so does our company. Learn more. http://bit.ly/1lCn2eR **

--SiriusXM's “No Labels Radio” (SUN 6am ET & 9pm ET): Jon Huntsman moderates an in-studio panel featuring No Labels vice chair Charlie Black, Roll Call’s Melinda Henneberger and The Stagwell Group founder Mark Penn. The panel will discuss the Iowa Caucuses, the prospects of a third party candidate, political endorsements, and whether 2016 will prove to be the year of the outsider. Available for download at http://www.nolabels.org

--Sinclair’s “Full Measure” with Sharyl Attkisson (SUN 9:30am ET on WJLA and airing on Sinclair stations nationwide): Report on the rising cost of healthcare under Obamacare; revealing the “Porker of the Year.”

****** A message from UnitedHealth Group: What does it take to create a modern, high-performing, simpler health care system? Expanding access to care through proven state-based coverage and employer-sponsored insurance. Making health care more affordable with consumer-directed care and value-based payments. Supporting and modernizing Medicare to meet the complex health challenges of America’s seniors. And reinvesting in health to support research and innovation. Learn more about these ideas at http://www.unitedhealthgroup.com ******